Into the forests with APP - Simon Enticknap, Print21 magazine
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Over the past few years, Asia Pulp and Paper, the massive Indonesian pulp and paper manufacturing group, has been the target of sustained attacks from green groups who claim the company is responsible for massive destruction of natural forests. Late last year, in order to present its own views on sustainability and conservation, APP invited a small group of local journalists to visit its operations in Sumatra. Simon Enticknap was one of them and he reports here on this long-running environmental battle in the heart of the jungle.
Taking off by helicopter from Pekanbaru airport in Sumatra, the massive Indah Kiat mill at Perawang soon looms into view on the horizon. It is a remarkable sight in such a relatively remote and rural part of the world, a giant tangle of metal pipes, chimney stacks and Lego block buildings. Swathed in clouds of steam, it resembles a living, breathing behemoth, or a huge alien mothership marooned in a sea of green vegetation. From above, there’s a clear view of the rows and rows of stacked logs waiting to be fed into the mill’s ever-hungry pulp and paper machines.
Opened in 1984, this is one of the largest mills in the region operating under the umbrella of Asia Pulp and Paper (APP), Indonesia’s largest – and some would say, most controversial – pulp and paper manufacturing company. As such, the Perawang mill is a powerful symbol and model of APP’s operations in Indonesia and, in particular, in the hotly-contested forests of Sumatra.
Flying on past the mill, the giant industrial plant soon gives way to a patchwork of small-scale farms, mainly for palm oil and rubber production, as well as some larger palm plantations, the row upon row of stumpy trees criss-crossed with roads and canals. Up ahead lie the vast forest plantations which supply the mill. Here, the vegetation becomes even and regulated, a uniform carpet of green with the only variation being the height of the trees indicating the different stages of planting and growth.
Further on still lies the jewel in the crown in this region, the 178,000 hectare conservation area of pristine forest at the heart of what is called the Giam Siak Kecil – Bukit Batu Biosphere reserve. Backed by the UN’s Man and Biosphere (MAB) program, this reserve was created to manage more than 700,000 hectares of land in the region (by way of comparison, the World Heritage Wet Tropics area in North Queensland covers about 900,000 hectares between Townsville and Cooktown). Basically, this involves designating three different areas, each with its own specific land uses. Around the periphery of the reserve, there is the Transition Area which comprises villages, farms and palm oil or rubber plantations. Inside that, there is the Buffer Zone which consists of pulpwood plantations, and then the conservation area in the middle which is virgin forest.
The idea is that surrounding the conservation area with the Buffer Zone of plantations managed by APP and its pulpwood suppliers will prevent illegal logging and encroachment by other land uses within the high conservation value area.
Flying over the conservation area, it is easy to see why this forest is worth preserving intact and untouched. Here, the trees are much taller and more diverse than the surrounding plantations, a multi-coloured canopy broken only by small clearances where older trees have fallen and new growth is racing towards the light. From the air, it is breath-takingly beautiful. Our guide tells us that this is practically the only way to experience it since, to date, no humans have penetrated to the heart of the forest on foot. The only other way in is via boat along the network of creeks and wetlands that meander through the region. It is an awesome sight.
It’s all the more shocking then to see parts of the conservation area near the border with the buffer zone which look as if they have been bombed. Here, in contrast to the precise harvesting of the plantation areas, the forest has been trashed; in many places, the felled trees haven’t even been carted away but just left strewn around the cleared land. In these patches, some of which are quite large, there are signs of new palm oil plantations and even makeshift huts. What’s going on here? Whatever happened to preserving the pristine wilderness?
Our guide tells us that this is the dreaded encroachment, the incursion of illegal settlers, some of whom come from outside the region, who enter the conservation zone and clear a patch of land to plant a crop and establish a landholding. In Australian terms, they are squatters, replicating the manner in which much of the Australian bush was cleared and settled in the 19th century: find some land, clear a patch, plant a crop and sit tight. But what about the Buffer Zone? Wasn’t that supposed to prevent encroachment into the conservation area?
It turns out that, in an ironic twist, the creation of conservation zones in the midst of production land can also work to attract the very people – settlers and illegal loggers – which such areas are designed to keep out. Settlers won’t occupy the plantation land because it is managed and controlled by the forestry companies (in fact, we’re told that when an area of plantation forest is harvested, it is almost immediately replanted to prevent encroachment). Inside the conservation area, however, which comes under the auspices of the national parks service, there is no such protection because the relevant government departments lack the resources to control illegal activity. It is one thing to designate an area of high conservation value, another thing altogether to manage it.
This particular conservation area was formed by an amalgamation of the Giam Siak Kecil and Bukit Batu national parks combined with logging concessions that have been left untouched by APP’s suppliers. All the signs of encroachment and illegal logging I saw were in the national park areas.
Such a scenario highlights the complexities of managing land use in a region where the demand for raw materials such as pulp, palm oil and rubber creates competition for the control - and conservation - of finite resources. Would the encroachment be worse if the Buffer Zone didn’t exist? APP claims that it would and says that it wants to work with local communities to educate them about the value of preserving the conservation areas rather than destroying them. Critics claim that it is pulpwood suppliers’ own forest clearing activities and plantations that attract the settlers.
Ultimately, at the heart of this issue is the question of who is responsible for the preservation – or destruction - of what is left of Sumatra’s wilderness.
Log Piles at the Indah Kiat mill. The tiny coloured trucks and loaders give some idea of the scale of the operation.
Forest battlelines
Any background research into APP’s activities soon unearths George Monbiot’s comment in the UK’s Guardian newspaper which describes it as making “a fair claim to being one of the most destructive companies on the planet”. Given the roll call of corporate environmental vandalism over the years, it’s a big call.
The reason for Monbiot’s comment is the evidence presented by several environmental groups and non-government organisations (NGOs) which accuse APP of numerous environmental transgressions over the past two decades. These include the practice of destroying vast tracts of pristine rainforest to supply the company’s pulp and paper-making operations, threatening the habitat of critically-endangered species such as the Sumatran tiger and orang-utan through deforestation, draining peatlands for conversion to plantation forests thereby contributing to the release of greenhouse gases, and alleged human rights abuses against local landowners.
In response, APP says its suppliers’ concessions are legally developed in compliance with Indonesian law and comprise the “least-valuable degraded forests and denuded wastelands”. Its paper products are manufactured using a mix of recycled paper and wood waste (about 35 per cent), imported pulp sourced from certified plantations (about 30 per cent), local plantation wood derived from what it calls ‘non-controversial sources that meet PEFC guidelines’, and 10 per cent from forests of ‘verified legal origin’. It says that it aims to be 100 per cent plantation-based by 2015 (opponents point out that APP has previously stated this goal and failed to achieve it) and to use 100 per cent certified pulp by 2020. APP also points to the fact that its mills have PEFC and LEI (Lembaga Ekolabel Indonesia) certification for chain of custody, and that annual audits by independent auditors, Société Générale de Surveillance (SGS), have found “no indication of any illegal fibre being harvested or being introduced into the fibre supply” at its pulp mills.
The battlelines in this dispute are entrenched and well-documented. In recent years, APP has been targeted by Greenpeace and other environmental groups such as the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and Eyes on the Forest (an alliance of Indonesian-based green groups) as part of an ongoing campaign to embarrass APP’s customers into boycotting the use of its paper products. Not all these products are associated with the graphic arts – part of the campaign has been directed at APP’s tissue products - but there have also been protests directed at print-related markets. For instance, US toy manufacturer, Mattel, was targeted last year to shift its packaging board supplies away from APP.
While the stoush between APP and Greenpeace and other NGOs may not seem directly relevant to the concerns of many local printers, it most certainly should be. According to the Australian government import figures, printing and writing paper from Indonesia has averaged around 60-70,000 tonnes over the past decade (Finland is still the largest single supplier with about 120,000 tonnes, closely followed by the US and South Korea). In addition, Indonesia supplies a further 20,000 tonnes of newsprint and 10,000 tonnes of packaging and industrial paper.
Although imports of printing and writing paper from Indonesia have been fairly constant (at least up until 2010/11 when the amount fell to 25,000 tonnes), the high water mark for imports was in the late 90s. In 1998-99, for instance, Indonesian imports reached nearly 130,000 tonnes, rivalling Finland as the biggest source of printing paper into Australia. The bigger story though is that, in the same year, imports from China were less than 1,000 tonnes; 10 years later, this figure has grown more than a 100 times bigger. This is significant because of the close ties between Indonesia and China in the pulp and paper market. APP, for instance, operates eight pulp and paper mills in Indonesia but also has an interest in a further six mills in China to which it supplies pulp sourced from Indonesia. Together, Indonesia and China now rank among the biggest suppliers of paper products to Australia.
Regardless of where local printers source their paper, disputes such as the one between APP and Greenpeace are bad news for the industry. All printers have a vested interest in ensuring that paper is manufactured using sustainable and environmentally-responsible processes. This is necessary not just because it is the right thing to do but also, from a purely self-interested perspective, in order to counter public misconceptions about paper and print being ‘bad’ for the environment.
In response to the attacks, APP has run its own high-profile PR and advertising campaigns to refute the “totally false” claims made by environmental groups. Hence this trip to Jakarta and Sumatra for a small group of journalists and industry representatives to experience first-hand operations at one of the company’s mills in Sumatra.
The Indah Kiat mill at Perawang in Sumatra produces over two million tonnes of pulp each year.
Back at the mill
Back on the ground, we are taken on a tour through some of the plantation forests and then onto the Indah Kiat mill itself.
The basic workings of the plantations will be familiar to anybody who has visited similar operations in Australia or overseas: the land is cleared, young trees are planted, they grow and, at a certain point, get harvested. Repeat the cycle. The main difference with these plantations however is the astonishing speed at which the trees grow. The acacias used here (mainly Acacia crassicarpa and mangium, both native to Australia, as well as some eucalypts) are ready for harvesting within five to six years of being planted – and these are not small trees either. It is this rapid rate of growth compared to the 25-30 years needed for forests to reach maturation in temperate climates which is seen as such a threat to European and North American paper companies. The Indonesian plantations can simply produce more pulp, more quickly.
The mill itself appears even more massive on the ground, like a small walled city complete with accommodation for workers and its own port facilities. About 10,000 people are employed at the mill and, according to APP, it supports 10 villages in the surrounding area. The scale of the operation here is certainly jaw-dropping. Currently it runs four pulp lines and seven paper-making machines, annually producing 2.4 million tonnes of pulp, 1.7 million tonnes of which is ‘dry’ pulp exported to China and other mills for further processing. The Perawang mill itself produces about 840,000 tonnes of paper each year, mainly copy paper which is sold into Asia but also some uncoated woodfree and packaging board.
To keep its pulp lines busy requires the supply of about 28,000 tonnes of logs every single day. As a result, there is a steady stream of trucks at the mill gates waiting to deliver their loads although, even with over 200 truckloads arriving every day, this still accounts for only about 30 per cent of the logs supplied; the remaining logs are delivered by boat and offloaded at the mill’s river port. At the mill gate, the APP guides highlight the chain of custody processes the mill operates to prevent illegal logging. These involve the truck drivers having their loads verified at the forestry concession before leaving and again on arrival at the mill. If the paperwork doesn’t match up, the load is rejected.
While the mill represents the ‘brawn’ of the paper-making process, the nearby research centre is most definitely the ‘brains’. Here, 70 researchers are involved in developing faster-growing, higher-yielding trees by means of selective cultivation. Started in 1990, it was the first research centre to start cultivating eucalypts for plantations in the region and, during that time, has increased the yield from such trees threefold.
Growing trees from seed is a slow process so instead a process of cloning is used whereby new trees are grown from tissue culture in a laboratory. The sight of thousands of tiny seedlings growing in glass jars under lights was one of the more bizarre of this trip. When they are big enough, the seedlings are transferred to huge nurseries outside to be acclimatised until they are ready for planting. More than 10 million new trees are grown this way using tissue cultures each year.
Hi-tech trees: cultivating new plantation trees in the laboratory and outside in the nursery.
Community help
Leaving the mill, we are taken to a nearby village to see a community centre funded by APP. Here, local school children are given access to computers and a library for after-school activities. APP supports the community in other ways too, for instance providing bus transportation to make it safer for children to get to school and, in a novel idea, setting up a ‘Lend-a-cow’ scheme so that families can borrow a cow to start their own herd. In another village in Central Java, as part of an eco-tourism project, APP is helping locals to renovate their homes and learn how to cook for tourists so they can host visitors and generate an income. Other programs include setting up water purification plants for villages, mobile health clinics, including on boats to access remote areas by river, and scholarships for up to 2,000 university students.
Aida Greenbury, managing director of APP sustainability and stakeholder engagement, pointed out that paper companies in other countries are not typically required to build schools, provide medical services or deliver clean water but APP does because no-one else will – and yet it still gets criticised for doing so.
At times, there is a clear frustration among the APP staff over what they perceive to be unfair attacks by NGOs from Western developed nations with less than perfect environmental records of their own (“They talk about us as if we’re barbarians hacking at the jungle,” as one put it) and the fact that no credit is given for any of the programs geared towards sustainability, conservation or the local communities. Whenever the company promotes an initiative such as the Biosphere reserve or the Senepis Sumatran tiger sanctuary, it inevitably gets labelled as ‘greenwash’ or as an inadequate redress for other environmental impacts.
Obviously this was just one visit to one mill in one part of Indonesia. As such, there are plenty of other people in the forestry, paper and environmental business better qualified than I am to pass judgement on APP’s operations. That these operations are on a huge scale is evidence enough, to some people, of negative environmental impacts, although that need not be the case. Could APP improve the certification of its processes with regard to sustainable management and chain of custody? No doubt it could, but the same can also be said for many paper companies around the world and, in common with them, APP has expressed its intent to do so. Certainly the company has the resources and the expertise to achieve this.
The printing industry has staked a lot on a narrative which presents paper as a renewable, sustainable resource and, as such, something to be desired in an increasingly disposable world. APP wants us to believe that it is following the same narrative as it seeks to exploit the natural resources at its disposal and build a long-term, sustainable industry. Whether or not this narrative turns out to be true – or even the right one to follow – is something only time will tell.
Indonesia - Getting to know the neighbours
Like Australia, Indonesia is a nation of islands except that, in the latter case, there are about 17,000 of them strung out along the equator. Add them all together and you get a land mass about the size of south-east Australia (NSW, Victoria and SA). Being in the tropics, roughly two-thirds of the land mass is covered with forest of which, according to the Indonesian Ministry of Forestry, about 45 per cent is classified as ‘production’ forest. Conservation areas and protected forests (such as areas within production concessions set aside for wildlife corridors) total about 50 million hectares or 27 per cent of the landmass (this compares to less than 8 per cent of Australia set aside for national parks or conservation areas).
The vast majority of the ‘production’ forest concessions are for solid wood products; pulp and paper concessions comprise about 5 per cent of the total of which APP says its own suppliers’ plantations account for about 1.4 million hectares, an area roughly the size of Sydney.
The other major difference between us and our next door neighbours is that whereas the total population of south-east Australia is approximately 15 million, Indonesia’s population is over 238 million, making it the fourth most populous nation. And while Australia currently sits at fifth on the global league table in terms of per capita GDP, Indonesia is 109th with about half the population living on less than $2 per day according to the World Bank.